Development of a cycle-accurate simulator of the Elbrus processor core memory subsystem

Abstract

Increasing complexity of modern microprocessors, combined with semiconductor technology progress slowdown, make a further increase in performance more difficult. Under these circumstances, the relevance of the performance estimations of prospective microprocessors by dint of cycle-accurate simulation prior to their production in silicon is of growing importance. The approach to implementation of cycle-accurate simulator of core memory subsystem for Elbrus architecture, controlled by the existing functional simulator of this architecture, is presented herein. The method for validation of a cycleaccurate simulator by comparison with modeling of the RTL description of the prospective microprocessor is considered. The data on the speed of the cycle-accurate simulator and the main optimization methods, which were used to achieve acceptable performance, are presented. The preliminary estimates of the impact on the performance of some changes in the prospective processor core, including the cache access latency and hardware support for virtualization, obtained with the help of the cycle-accurate simulator are given. These assessments are important for making architectural decisions when designing the prospective Elbrus architecture processors.